Liberated Body Podcast

Leslie Kaminoff has been a yoga educator for the last four decades and is an internationally recognized specialist in the fields of yoga and breath anatomy. He leads anatomy and yoga methodology workshops for many of the leading yoga associations, schools and training programs in the world. He is the co-author of the bestselling book Yoga Anatomy, and the founder of The Breathing Project, Leslie has also helped to organize international yoga conferences while serving as Vice-President of Unity in Yoga, and was part of the committee that established national standards for yoga teacher training. In today’s conversation we’re talking about what it was like to have a front row seat for the birth of the fitness and yoga industries in the United States, concepts related to breath and breath anatomy, the art of teaching and the importance of creating an atmosphere of inquiry in yoga classes and how that can honor students’ individuality and allow for deeper insights.

Today I’m talking with Amy Matthews. Amy Matthews, has been teaching movement since 1994. She is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst, a Body-Mind Centering® Teacher, an Infant Developmental Movement Educator, and a movement therapist and yoga teacher. Amy is also the co-author of the best-selling book Yoga Anatomy, and together Amy and Leslie teach The Breathing Project's Advanced Studies courses. I will also be moderating a symposium called Beyond Anatomy with Amy at The Breathing Project soon- the first weekend of April. In today’s conversation we’re talking about Laban Movement Analysis and body mind centering, developmental movement work, and what that means for infants- how they can get a solid foundation for personal agency and emotional regulation through movement, and how developmental movement work helps adults as well. We also talk about embodied teaching, how teaching is its own art form and how it can call forth student’s personal agency.

Katy Bowman is a biomechanist and the founder of Nutritious Movement. She is the author of several books including Move Your DNA, Whole Body Barefoot, and her most recent collection of essays, Movement Matters. In today’s conversation we’re talking about the ecology of movement. How does your movement affect not just your health but also humans everywhere, even ones you’ve never met, and how does it affect the health of the planet as a whole? We discuss the real impact of our sedentarism and our drive for convenience, and how movement can be a very profound and impactful form of activism.

I’m talking with Leslie Kaminoff, Amy Matthews, and Peter Blackaby about our upcoming somatic symposium in New York this April called Beyond Anatomy. There is a vast amount of information about the body out there (and in here within the show)- so how do we discern what's applicable and useful and not simply make ourselves crazy with information overload? And what is ""beyond anatomy"" to each of us? For me this is a fantastic way to kick off the whole of season 4 as I am dedicating that season to interviews related to what happens- what happens inside yourself, in your life, in your community- when you dive deeply into the body experientially, rather than simply intellectually. This doesn't mean we're chucking the importance of learning critical things like anatomy- but it does mean there's more to the story. Much, much more!

Bo Forbes turns the tables and interviews host Brooke Thomas with her own and listener questions. Brooke's personal path with her own body, how learning through the podcast changed the way she sees the body, how she parents based on what she's learned, her current practices (particularly in natural movement and somatic meditation), and what the road ahead looks like are all covered in this closing conversation for season 3.

I’m talking with Cynthia Price. Cynthia describes herself as a bodywork researcher, and is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Washington in the Biobehavioral Nursing Department. Her clinical and research expertise is in the development of body awareness, or interoception, to improve health and well-being. She is the creator of an approach towards educating people in body awareness called Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy or MABT for short, and is the founder of the Center for Mindful Body Awareness. Her research studies have focused on the use of MABT for multiple health conditions including Substance Dependency, PTSD, chronic pain, and HIV. Interested in the processes involved in learning mindful body awareness, Cynthia studies qualitative aspects and underlying mechanisms of the MABT approach. She is an author of two scales to measure interoceptive awareness: the Scale of Body Connection (SBC) and the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). Committed to incr

Today I’m talking with Dr. Jean-Claude Guimberteau. Dr Guimberteau practiced for many years as a hand surgeon specializing in microsurgical replantation and transplantation. He is the co-founder and former scientific director of The Aquitany Hand Institute, and was the director of research at the French Society of Plastic Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery. Many of you know him best for his groundbreaking work exploring and defining the movement of tissues beneath the skin using an intraoperative endoscopic camera to record living tissues, and to develop concepts related to the new paradigm of biological structure in human beings. You can view some of those videos on YouTube, and the DVD and illustrated book, The Architecture of Human Living Fascia, explores the subject very deeply. In our conversation today we talk about how he transitioned out of performing surgery and into this discovery of form. We talk about the multimicrovacuolar collagenous absorbing system, or MVCAS for short, and what it has to do

Julie Angel received her doctorate researching Parkour, and she has a new book out, Breaking the Jump, which chronicles the birth of this movement. The book, and our conversation, wind up tackling the larger issues that have emerged out of Parkour- like how the origin and effects of this movement is about something so much bigger than athletics or physical training; Really how it was and is a way to evolve as a human. We also get into our cultural biases to, on the one hand, abuse ourselves with physical training, and on the other hand be so obsessively careful and terrified of movement or of leaning into the edges of one’s capabilities that we wind up without much middle ground. We also discuss Julie’s personal journey from a sedentary academic to someone who also does Parkour and how that has changed her and how she sees the world.

Jaap van der Wal is a phenomenological embryologist who is looking for the soul via the embryo and teaches about this all over the world through his Embryo in Motion project. In our conversation today we talked about the dualistic time we are living in and how we make the brain and/or the genes the most important “parts” of the body- how we conceptually consider the body a machine that comes in parts, and the way we separate the soul from the body. Jaap discusses how the embryo challenges the notion that we are our brains, that genes do not cause what happens in a body, that motion is primary and form is secondary- or that we are always a present tense alive process that is performing, and hence creating, the body , what fascia has to do with all of this, and that the body does not have a soul, it IS a soul.

Cathy Kerr is the director of the Mind In Body Lab at Brown University. Her research focuses on whether brain rhythms underlying body awareness and movement are actively modulated by mindfulness and movement practices such as Tai Chi and Qigong. Her hope is that understanding how these therapies work will have a positive impact on conditions like aging and chronic pain or functional disorders where these approaches have shown the clearest therapeutic benefit. She joined me today to talk about the focus of her research broadly, but also to discuss a specific research study that is in progress which is looking at the effects of qigong on distressed female cancer survivors, and tells us a great deal about qigong’s effect on inflammation.

In this episode I am talking with John Sharkey who is a Clinical Anatomist, Exercise Physiologist, and European Neuromuscular Therapist. He has developed the worlds only Masters Degree in Neuromuscular Therapy which is Accredited by the University of Chester, he is on the editorial board for the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, the International Journal of Osteopathy, and the International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork.. He is also a member of the Olympic Councils medical Team and a founding member of the B.I.G, otherwise known as the Biotensegrity Interest Group). He has also authored several books including the 3rd edition of The Concise Book of Muscles which we talk about in the interview. John and I are talking here in great depth about the old paradigm of anatomy and biomechanics and what the new paradigm holds. This is critical stuff here. We are on the brink of a new understanding of the living human body and it’s time to look at the old models, look at where they come from, an

Dr. Eyal Lederman joins me to talk in particular about his paper titled “A process approach in manual and physical therapies: beyond the structural model" and his controversial view that the structural model is outdated and needs to be replaced. We discuss what he sees it replaced with and how patients are treated at his clinic, and what the benefits are to people when we expand beyond structural explanations for things.

Bo Forbes is a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and Integrative Yoga Therapist. We’re following up on the last two episodes which are pretty interoception based- first with Will Johnson and then with Norm Farb. A central guiding theme of Bo’s work is with interoception, and she has put together the Interoception Tribal Council which is bringing together researchers, primarily neuroscientists, who are looking at interoception and its effect on the whole person’s health both physically and mentally. In this conversation we talk about some of the amazing research that is coming out these days, but we also talk about her own experience putting her interoceptive abilities to the test when she underwent hip surgery this year- which was her 4th hip surgery in 8 years. It’s a really beautiful story of living one’s practice.

Wil Johnson is the founder of the Institute for Embodiment Training. In today’s conversation we dove into what Dr. Rolf’s original concept of “The Line” was, and discuss its implications for both finding delicious support in our bodies and also for its ability to evoke our evolutionary potential.

Dr. Steve Gangemi, aka The Sock Doc, has ruffled more than a few feathers with his proclamations that stretching is for Bozos... these days he's tempered his statement to "stop mindless stretching". He joins me in this conversation to talk about what stretching even is, what flexibility is really a reflection of (hint: it's not your stretching regimen), why we might feel the need to stretch, and more.

I give my take on the 7th Biotensegrity Interest Group, the 1st Biotensegrity Summit, and the 4th Fascia Research Congress all of which recently took place in Reston, Virginia.

James Earls, author of Born to Walk, takes a very whole system approach to understanding walking.We talk about how the whole body walks, different schools of thought that have looked at walking in “parts” instead, how we are seduced into seeing anatomy with the same eye that we look at the manmade world around us, his homage to Robert Hooke who was a contemporary of Newton’s,understanding ground reaction force, the essentialness of efficiency in our evolution, the debate about whether or not walking is controlled falling, fascial wrappings as hydraulic amplifiers and oh so much more. 

Dr. Dan Keown, who is both a Western medical doctor and a Chinese medicine doctor joins me for a conversation about his book The Spark in the Machine. We talk about many of the crucial things that Western medicine ignores- things like fascia, extracellular fluid, how an embryo knows how to organize around a seeming blueprint, and how your spirit affects your health. We talk about how fascia explains chi, how and why jing and shen are better predictors of lifespan and health than a person’s genetics, what cancer has to do with fascia and chi, how we are all built like crystals and what that has to do with piezoelectricity, and so much more.